Those of you who follow my blog know I am a Parallax fan and dedicated customer. Here is one reason why...

This graphic is not just an advertising slogan. Visit Parallax's online store or learn.parallax.com or their amazing user forum at forums.parallax.com and see for yourself. Almost all their excellent resources are available online or in pdf - completely free for anyone to use! The company has the best technical, educational and customer support in the business.

This is exactly how I started in robotics - by reading and studying their materials online - I did not have much money at the time and was not sure what to buy. So I studied, and studied - for free and then eventually made a dive into the deep end! The people at Parallax and other users of their products have taught and encouraged me at every stage along the way.

They have a new educational robot coming soon - the S3 - expect to hear a lot here about this little but powerful educational robot! Simple enough for a child - powerful enough for an experienced roboteer The S3 will be used from elementary schools to universities!

You can read more about the S3 robot here and more about BlocklyProp here.

Blockly, Google's open source graphic programming language, has been developed by the Parallax as BlocklyProp. It is going to be an amazing education tool and is powerful, but is also just plain fun!

Thursday, August 18, 2016

This from MIT News - "Researchers at MIT, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have demonstrated a tiny origami robot that can unfold itself from a swallowed capsule and, steered by external magnetic fields, crawl across the stomach wall to remove a swallowed button battery or patch a wound. (Learn more about the robot: http://mitsha.re/zeUF300969v)"

“It’s really exciting to see our small origami robots doing something with potential important applications to healthcare,” Daniela Rus says. Pictured, an example of a capsule and the unfolded origami device.

The coolest part, as far as I am concerned, is that the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science who's team developed the robot is named Daniela Rus! That's RUS!

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

The Parallax S3 is coming soon. Over at the Parallax Forums, and on the Parallax site - here and here, they have been teasing us with photos and production updates. The new robot will be programmable in Spin, of course, but also in Blockly using a Parallax grown version called BlocklyProp. Take a look at the BlocklyProp Demo here. It is still under development, but moving rapidly. Can not wait!

The Parallax Team is doing amazing things again! Like the original Blue Scribbler and improved S2 - The S3 promises to be a perfect way to learn about robotics. This is honestly keeping me up at night!